‘Now move!’ he snapped. ‘No going back for them, no sitting around spectating! Get your legs moving, come on. They’ll be after us quick enough.’
Che was learning about a chain of command.
The slaves had been trickling in for days, but word was spreading. Some came because Messel or others had warned them to flee, others because the Worm had descended on their villages, taken their remaining children and begun killing the rest. Nobody could say how many communities had nobody left to speak for them, wiped out without witnesses, their lights put out forever.
There were a handful like the Moth, Atraea, who had been headmen and headwomen of their own communities. These Che set to work in organizing the rest. They pooled whatever food there was, found places to sleep, reunited families. Others, those who could move swiftly and surely in the dark, were set to foraging – young Moths and the blind Cave Crickets of Messel’s kinden particularly. They ranged further and further, hunting with their slings and gathering fungus and lichens. Some of them did not return.
Darmeyr Forge-Iron and a few others were responsible for recruiting more warriors. None of the slaves had any prior experience, but many were willing, in return for having their dependants fed and looked after. There were plenty of Worm swords, and there was a little armour, and anyone who could use a sling was always welcome.
But there was no time for training. Anyone who could demonstrate to Darmeyr and the others that they had the will and an able body was sent on to wherever Thalric was going next, in the hope of rescuing more from the jaws of the Worm.
The Worm had not found them yet. Che suspected the Worm had not even begun to appreciate what was going on. At some point it would realize, in its blinkered, hungry way, that things were not going as they should.
She did not know what they would do then. No ideas had come to her.
Now she strode through the camp, aware of the attention fixed on her: the woman from the other world whose eyes had seen the sun. Some seemed to treat her with a reverence she found uncomfortable; others scowled at her. Still more did not care, concerned solely with their own well-being, their own fears.
Orothellin had walked amongst them earlier, to calm them. Everyone seemed to know the ancient Slug-kinden, and to call him Teacher. He had been a calming influence in the often-disruptive life of the camp. Now he was gone, though, to help bring in more of the lost, to try and thwart the predations of the Worm. Che was left to manage on her own.
Not on her own, quite. She had Tynisa as her constant shadow, though after her failure on the way to the Hermit’s cave the Weaponsmaster was riddled with doubts about whether she would serve any useful purpose when the Worm arrived. She had the Hermit, too, although the ragged old man stayed out of everyone’s way, by mutual consent.
Tynisa worried Che, if only because the less credence the Weaponsmaster put in her own abilities, the more she seemed to defer to her sister. She dogged Che’s footsteps as though the Beetle was the only spark of hope in the whole underworld. As though Che knew what she was doing.
And I’m still working on that one. No guarantees.
Che stopped to receive the latest news: more arrivals in, word from Messel, movements of the Worm. She did her best to listen, to take it all in and end up with a coherent picture of what was going on. She was terrified that vital information was slipping through the cracks in her mind.
‘What will you do if you win?’ Tynisa asked her suddenly.
Che almost replied, I don’t think that’s very likely, all very self-deprecating as a polite Collegium girl should be. But that was not what anyone wanted to hear. Instead she hedged, ‘Win?’
‘If you defeat the Worm.’ Tynisa, who had not seen that darkly shining abomination beneath the stone city, sounded almost optimistic about it. ‘These people have never known anything other than this. They’re slaves born.’
‘Nobody’s a slave born.’ It was pure polemic but, as she said it, Che realized it was true in a way. ‘The Worm didn’t feed these people, or house them or clothe them. Take away their masters and they will live and thrive.’ Easier here than in the Empire, if only the Worm could be resisted as the Wasps can. ‘The Worm is a parasite on all of them, on this entire world. It takes, and gives nothing – not even the tyranny of order. If we can defeat the Worm, or outlast it or exhaust it, then these people will live very well in its absence.’ She glanced up at Tynisa, seeing her frown. ‘You doubt me?’
‘It’s just . . . what then?’ the Weaponsmaster finally managed to say, apparently wrestling with the question herself. ‘And will this place be cut off forever, or will it join up with what we know, or . . . I mean, if we fit back with the world we came from, what happens when the Wasps come down here and enslave everyone, or Helleren magnates realize there’s a whole nation of cheap labour, or . . .’
‘You have been thinking this through,’ Che noted, as if she was a proud College Master. ‘Well, perhaps I will have them cast lots and form an assembly of the underworld. Perhaps it will be they who venture into the lands of the Wasps and Beetles, rather than the other way round. Perhaps everyone will finally learn to live with one another and there will be no more war. Only, let us just find a way to beat the Worm first, Tynisa.’ She heard her own voice tremble a little with the words. ‘There’s no sense in planning for tomorrow when we haven’t secured today.’
They thought Esmail was mad. He himself wasn’t sure whether the whole exercise was just stupidity or a failure to adapt. His discipline was unknown here in the underworld, though. If he did not test his limits, how would he ever know?
He was being forced to improvise: conditions were adverse.
There had been a community here in the darkness by the name of Old Aderax. Enough Moths had lived there that he wondered if the name was an echo of Dorax, the Moth hold that still existed back in the familiar world. He and Orothellin had gone there to spread the word, lunatic missionaries crying out that the end really was nigh.
By that time their enemies – or perhaps Enemy singular, by Che’s version – had become aware that something was amiss. The response had been fierce. Locals, using their Art wings and the dark-seeing eyes of their kinden, had reported a host of the Worm descending on them. Fighting to win had been out of the question, whatever Che might have wanted. Fighting to give the bulk of them a chance to escape – the non-combatants, the few remaining children – had become a necessity.
Old Aderax had been a layered city, a strip mine that people lived in, descending in broad tiers into the pit of its own workings. Esmail had been hoping that the Worm would just swarm them, as blunt and simple as the force Che had claimed possessed it, but the horde of bodies sent against them instead split into snaking columns, each accompanied by a seething foam of their sinuous beasts. The armed defenders who had hoped to delay them had been flanked almost immediately.
That was when Esmail had seen it: of course there were minds directing the assault – not the blind and oblivious Worm-god but the Scarred Ones, the priests, those who had betrayed humanity to buy themselves back from oblivion.